✧ Monday Meditation ✧
🌱Lying Fallow & The Fierce Seeds Beneath
Dear Becoming Ones,
Each Monday, I offer a meditation as a small act of resistance and repair. Today, as the sun sets earlier and the cold prepares the earth for its long dreaming, I’m thinking about what it means to lie fallow — to trust the unseen work of rest.
The land is slowing. The ground is gathering itself.
What if we joined it?
In a culture shaped by accelerated techno-feudalism, where value is measured by output and speed, choosing to hibernate — to protect our energy, to tend our inner soil — becomes a counter-cultural practice of liberation. Jenney Odell reminds us, in How to Do Nothing, that refusing productivity can be a way of reclaiming our lives from the machinery of extraction.
To lie fallow is not to fail.
It is to prepare.
It is to become durable for the spring that will come.
So I ask you gently:
What kind of winter do you long for this year?
A winter of unraveling?
Of rooted healing?
Of quiet, wombed hope?
May this meditation invite you into an underground grace —
a season where doing less becomes a strategy of becoming more.
Paz, —RCE+
✧ Monday Meditation ✧
🌱Lying Fallow & The Fierce Seeds Beneath
“This is the inheritance of the subterranean.
We grow in the dark so that we might break the world open with light.”
— (mixing Anzaldúa + Moten)
🍂 1 — The Turn Toward Fallow
Deep in December, the hills of Western New York have laid down their orange and gold garments and pulled a gray sky across their shoulders. The fields are entering that holy pause — the fallow time. Not dead. Not gone. Simply refusing productivity’s constant demand.
In this season, rest becomes rebellion.
Stillness becomes strategy.
The land is teaching us:
✨ Dormancy is a form of devotion.
🌑 2 — Seeds We Cannot Yet See
Beneath the ground — where earthworms script stories and mycelium whispers in chorus — seeds are preparing themselves for the great becoming. They do their most important work hidden from view.
We, too, are becoming in the dark.
Sometimes the work of repair happens under the surface:
in our unspoken prayers
in the trembling yes to therapy
in the private confessions of our longing to change
🕳️ Buried seeds are a quiet army against annihilation.
🔥 Fierce with potential.
✨✝️ 3 — Theology of Wintering
Incarnation begins in obscurity —
Mary’s womb, a Bethlehem stable, a world asleep to its own salvation.
The Divine is no stranger to underground movements.
God roots into human flesh the way roots search for water:
relentless, tender, refusing to be cut off from possibility.
🌱 The sacred starts small.
Hidden. Gestating.
Waiting for Kairos to thaw the soil.
💛 4 — A Pastoral Turn
Beloveds:
What in you is lying fallow right now?
What dreams are curled beneath the frost, conserving their strength?
What buried grief is slowly metabolizing into a future you cannot name?
Trust that what feels like pause
may be holy preparation.
Trust that the night is a womb
and you are being held.
🕯️ 5 — Ritual of Grounded Hope
Wherever you are, place your hands upon the nearest ground —
the floor, your own chest, the dirt outside your door.
Breathe with the earth:
Inhale: I am held.
Exhale: I am becoming.
Light a small candle — a seed of fire —
and let it teach you that warmth persists
even when the air grows cold.
🌀 Field Guide for Underground Resistance
Where can I surrender the tyranny of productivity and choose possibility instead?
What seeds of justice, tenderness, and repair am I planting quietly in my community?
Who might need a reminder that they are still growing — even now, especially now?
What underground network of care am I part of nurturing?
How can I honor the work my body and spirit are doing beneath the visible?
🌾 Benediction
May we practice fallowness as both a womb and a strategy.
May we trust the seeds beneath us — and within us — fighting for spring.